“If you like simple forms in art, you will not make complicated ones in architecture,” wrote Donald Judd in his 1993 essay “It’s Hard to Find a Good Lamp.” Judd went on to emphasize that other forms of design are indeed art, but a simple conversion of art into architecture or furniture does not make good architecture or furniture. 

Internationally, Judd is perhaps one of the most well-known American artists of the mid-twentieth century. His carefully constructed boxes seem to have been tailor-made for the fast pace of our cultural consumption, even fifty years before Instagram has solidified our voracious appetite for the generic, yet instantly identifiable. Judd’s rigor and devotion to modesty, purity, craft, precision, and proportion is evident in and even synonymous with his artwork. Judd’s work has been collected and shown by dozens of the most reputable modern art museums all over the world.

Less well-known, however, are his writings, architecture, and furniture. Five of his architectural works, from the later years of his life, are currently on view at the Center for Architecture in New York, in the exhibit entitled Obdurate Space: Architecture of Donald Judd, curated by Claude Armstrong and Donna Cohen. The exhibit is a welcome complement to the recently renovated Judd Foundation in Soho, a several minute walk away, where his art and attitudes on architecture can be seen in the flesh.

The recent renovation of his cast-iron building, which he purchased in 1968, encapsulated the larger context in which Judd envisioned his work. 

In a 1989 essay on his 101 Spring Street building, he wrote:

I thought the building should be repaired and basically not changed. It is a nineteenth-century building. It was pretty certain that each floor had been open, since there were no signs of original walls, which determined that each floor should have one purpose: sleeping, eating, working.

This prescribed how ARO approached the renovation of the building when they began working on the project in 2005. With a robust team of consultants, ARO first engaged in five years of intensive research and design, and finally began construction in 2010. The renovated building, which opened to the public in 2013 as the home to the Judd Foundation,
is as close a rendition of Judd’s New York home as one could imagine. 

The new space retains all of Judd’s own interventions in the space - from new flooring and ceilings, to plastered walls, built-in bookshelves, mezzanine levels and sleeping lofts. Brand-new mechanical and electrical systems were in most cases invisibly integrated throughout the building, making this a highly-controlled machine that happily takes a backseat to let the original character of the spaces shine center stage. Judd’s custom designed furniture and constructions were placed back in their original locations to offer us a near-exact snapshot of how Judd created his own environment. It is a rare opportunity to see an artist’s work installed exactly as he envisioned it. As Judd later wrote about the installations at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, “it takes a great deal of time and thought to install work carefully. […] Somewhere, a portion of contemporary art has to exist as an example of what the art and its context were meant to be.”

The parallels between his most well-known works and his design for 101 Spring are easy to draw. Suddenly, his aluminum boxes - a series of which is wall-mounted on the ground level of the building - can be understood as a sequence of spaces, enclosures that are as much exploring the space they frame within them, as the negative space that they shape between them. In much the same way, Judd’s consideration of each floor as programmatically separate can be understood as defining individual units that come together as part of the larger whole. The staircases that connect the floors were left in their original used state, lined with eclectic wooden masks and other small, collected objects. The barrier between these dark sloping spaces and the rectilinear open spaces, naturally-lit from an abundance of large windows, is distinctly marked - sometimes with doorways, other times with heavily narrowed passageways. Judd’s mark on the space is most prominent on the upper floors. On the third floor, he lightly pulled the floor away from the wall to create a thin reveal; a subtle detail (a nod to Carlo Scarpa, perhaps?) that makes a big impact on the overall space. The floor seems to float as a solid plane, interrupting the precision of the box. On the fourth floor, the wood floor is mirrored with a wood ceiling, creating two parallel planes between which we occupy space. On the fifth floor, the floor wraps up onto the wall, with baseboards of the same oak. Once again, Judd’s intervention is simple, but effective; we lose the purity of the ninety-degree angle where we expect white wall and wood floor to meet.

The exhibition Obdurate Space: Architecture of Donald Judd, currently on view at the Center for Architecture in New York, is a striking new view of the evolution of Judd’s architectural works. Curated by architects Claude Armstrong and Donna Cohen, two of Judd’s assistants, the show focuses on built and unrealized architectural projects, designed between 1984 and 1994. Armstrong and Cohen reveal five projects that are part of a largely unknown body of work - Eichholteren on Lake Lucerne in Switzerland; the Concrete Buildings in Marfa, Texas; an archive and office building for Kunsthaus Bregenz (Austria); a lakefront proposal for Cleveland, Ohio; and Bahnhof Ost in Basel. They are shown through archival drawings, models, and photography. For as well known as Judd’s art is in the architecture community, for the most part (his Marfa work being the exception), Judd’s architecture is almost universally unknown.

From the first explorations of space, interiority, and scale in his former residence at 101 Spring Street, to his expanded architectural-scale interventions in his series of Marfa properties, to the later buildings presented in the show, we can see Judd’s effort to develop his architecture as an independent branch of his work. As he wrote in 1993, “the configuration and the scale of art cannot be transposed into furniture and architecture.”

Lastly, it is perhaps no wonder that the vaulted arch was used in Judd’s work, considering that Aldo Rossi was taking Venice by storm at the end of the 1970s and into the mid-eighties. In his later writings, Judd describes a particular detail from his designs for 101 Spring Street: the custom steel oval sinks he had made for the upstairs bathroom. The oval is not a form you would generally associate with Judd’s artwork, which was exactly his intent. As he notes, “these were designed directly as sinks; they were not a conversion; I did not confuse them with art.” 

Judd was intentionally seeking to visually separate his art and architecture, so that even if created by the same hand with the same predilections, they would be viewed as separate bodies of work. As Obdurate Space makes clear, while Judd’s architectural body of work is nowhere near as extensive as his art work, it is worth celebrating in its own right.

The exhibit, Obdurate Space: Architecture of Donald Judd, is open at the Center for Architecture (536 LaGuardia Place New York, NY 10012) through March 5th, 2018. Special thanks to the curators, Claude Armstrong and Donna Cohen, for bringing this body of work to life in the exhibit, to the Center for Architecture for hosting the exhibit, and a special thanks to Adam Yarinsky, Principal at ARO, for an insightful tour around his spectacular renovation of the Judd Foundation at 101 Spring St. New York, NY 10012.